Barnaby stiffened against him.
“Not a complaint,” Lex said. “I loved it. Every second of it. But your family’s in the house.”
Barnaby twisted in his arms and looked at him with a flat, steady expression that communicated perfect composure and absolutely no intention of discussing this further. “We’re in a twenty-six-room manor house. In our own wing.” His voice was hoarse, which somewhat undermined the authority behind his statement. “Nobody heard us.”
Lex grinned. He pulled Barnaby tighter against his chest, and Barnaby went without resistance, tucking his face into the curve of Lex’s neck, his breath warm against Lex’s collarbone. Florence’s claws clicked somewhere in the corridor outside, and the old house settled around them, creaking in the wind.
Chapter Eighteen
Meridianhad been restless in the cross-ties, stamping and tossing his head while Barnaby picked out his hooves, but an hour of groundwork in the outdoor school had settled him. Barnaby had lunged him through his paces, long rein to working trot to collected canter, until the tension left his quarters and his stride came through even and soft. Then he’d groomed him out, rugged him, turned him into the paddock, and stood at the fence for ten minutes watching him roll in a patch of mud that undid every minute of the grooming. Horses were, in Barnaby’s experience, the only creatures on earth more committed to dismantling your work than a younger sibling.
He came in through the boot room, scraped his yard boots on the iron, and hung his Barbour on the peg beside his father’s. The house smelled of toast and coffee and something rich, bacon fat rendered in a pan rather than grilled, which meant Mrs Farrow had been persuaded to do a full cooked breakfast instead of the continental his mother preferred on weekdays.
Barnaby washed his hands at the scullery sink, dried them on a towel, and walked through to the dining room.
The long table was laid for breakfast in the usual Chatham House fashion. Silver chafing dishes on the sideboard, a rack of toast under a cloth, a pot of marmalade that Mrs Farrow made herself from the Seville oranges his mother had shipped from a supplier in Andalusia every January. His father was at the head of the table in a tweed jacket and reading glasses, theTelegraphopen beside his plate. His mother was opposite, in a cream blouse with her hair pinned back, one hand resting on her coffee cup while she read something on her mobile.
Peregrine was hunched over a bowl of something violently coloured. The cereal turned the milk a shade of blue that did not occur in nature. Barnaby had once checked the box and discovered it contained more E-numbers than a chemistry set and listed its primary ingredient as “maize flour (with added vitamins!),” the exclamation mark performing an extraordinary amount of work. Perry ate it every morning.
Lex was there, in the chair beside his mother, holding a cup of tea. His hair was still damp from the shower. His forearms were bare on the white tablecloth, and the Duke was leaning forward in his chair, examining the ink that crept from beneath Lex’s sleeve.
“And this one?” His father tapped the edge of his reading glasses against the table. “The script, there. On the inside of your arm?”
Lex turned his wrist. “That’s my nan’s handwriting. She wrote me a note before my first professional fight.Give ‘em hell, baby.I got it done the week after she passed.”
“Marvellous,” the Duke said, with feeling. “I nearly got one myself, you know. Sixty-seven, I think it was. No — sixty-eight. We were stationed in Aden. Chap in my platoon had a friend who did them out of a tin shed near the port. Anchor andcrossbones. I had my shirt off and was ready to go, and then Dickie Fanshawe pointed out that my mother would have me disinherited, and that was the end of that.”
“You should get one,” Lex said. “It’s never too late. I know a bloke in Shoreditch who could sort you out. His place is very clean and he does all the footballers.”
The Duke looked genuinely tempted. Barnaby’s mother, without raising her eyes from her mobile, said, “No.”
Lex laughed, full-throated and delighted, and the Duke went pink with pleasure at having produced it. Barnaby pressed his tongue against his teeth to keep the grin from reaching his face.
Then he registered the figure at the far end of the table.
James was sitting to the right of the Duke, in a waxed jacket and a checked shirt with the collar open. He would have had to plan this visit, make arrangements with his private secretary, and driven an hour and a half into Kent without telling Barnaby he was coming. He looked up when Barnaby appeared in the doorway, and smiled.
Just a month ago, Barnaby would have crossed the room, dropped into the chair beside him, and stolen a triangle of his toast. Today, Barnaby bowed and said “Your Majesty,” before he pulled out the chair beside Peregrine and sat down.
The room absorbed his formality. His mother’s gaze lifted from her mobile for a fraction of a second. His father turned a page of theTelegraph. Perry’s spoon continued its circuit from bowl to mouth without interruption. The Fitznorman-Bicesters had been hosting royalty since the Restoration. They knew what a formal address at a family breakfast meant, and they knew better than to acknowledge it.
Lex looked between them, his brow creasing.
“D’you have a good ride?” James asked.
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Meridian behaving?”
“Perfectly.”
James picked up his tea. He took a sip, set it down, and tried again. “I was telling Lex about the time you fell off Meridian at Badminton. He stopped at the brush fence and you went over his neck and landed in the—”
“I remember.”
Mrs Farrow appeared with a fresh pot of coffee. Barnaby poured himself a cup and drank it black, because adding milk required reaching past Perry for the jug, and he didn’t want to move more than was necessary. Perry, who possessed the emotional radar of a coat stand, carried on eating his blue cereal and scrolling through something on his mobile beneath the table, where their mother couldn’t see the screen.
“How’s the cross-country course shaping up for Burghley?” James asked.
